


Mercenary

by HappinessIsBlau



Series: Fallout 4 Daily Writing Prompt Fills [16]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Friendship/Love, Gen, One-Sided Attraction, a lil bit of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 14:14:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12322626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappinessIsBlau/pseuds/HappinessIsBlau
Summary: He’d have asked for twice that if he knew it’d be so easy.





	Mercenary

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to trope-land, where everything is a cliché and nothing hurts.

She was pretty like a pre-war pinup, all red hair and green eyes and freckles for days. She had the blue vault suit v-necked tastefully, but he could still see the smattering of freckles across her collarbone when she held out her hand and he shook it. 

“Two fifty and not a bit less,” he demanded, and her laugh echoed off the walls. She took out her coin purse, a dainty rocket-shaped thing like he’d seen in so many bombed out souvenir stores down in DC, and paid him without blinking. 

He’d have asked for twice that if he knew it’d be so easy. 

He’d heard of her, sure -- he figured that death couldn’t keep a mother away from her stolen son. 

When it came to sacrificing for your children, he understood completely. 

-

“Quincy’s overrun by Gunners,” she said one afternoon, polishing the metal on her favorite sniper rifle that she’d nicknamed “Betsy” because she thought it was hilarious, “and we’re gonna do something about it.” 

His stomach dropped and his mouth tasted like acid but he nodded. Where she went, he’d follow. That was their contract, after all. Since he’d helped the Gunners take over Quincy, he figured that if they lived through it that he’d get some good karma for fixing his mistake. 

So all 5’10 of her and all 5’6 of him ventured south to Quincy, under the cover of night, and cleaned out the Gunners. 

The Gunners were good, but she was better. Sniping them one by one off of the highest roof pointed south as he did the same pointed north was a great tactical decision. 

When every sunuva was dead, a pile of spent casings were at their feet. 

“That was awesome,” she breathed, wiping sweat from her forehead before making her way from their sniper’s nest down to the street level. She cleared out the remaining mercenaries from the rest of the buildings in the town before he’d even made it down behind her. 

A capable woman who was good with a sniper rifle and smiled like an old postcard from Las Vegas? Okay, yeah, he was smitten. 

Thereafter, they’d swapped stories about parenting. Her son was just a baby but he remembered what it was like when Duncan was that little. Picky eating stories and diaper changing stories were swapped like gossiping neighbors. He was more interested than appropriate when she’d told him about Shaun and her doting neighbors and she was full of questions when he mentioned moving from the old Capital to Boston with a young wife and a newborn. 

-

“I want you to meet someone,” she said one morning. He had a mouthful of mac n cheese but he nodded and gave her a thumbs up instead.

They hiked back to Sanctuary Hills, and it always made her sad to be there. He shifted uncomfortably as she cheerfully greeted the settlers there who were living out of all the old houses and newly-built shacks. She led him behind the town and across a rackety bridge to a hill -- an overlook. The skeletons and faded propaganda told him immediately where they were going: 

Vault 111. Her home. 

“I don’t talk much about home, other than Shaun,” she said quietly as she hit the switch to open the sealed doors to the Vault, “but I want you to meet Nate.” 

Nate, her husband. Of course. 

He could feel the color drain out of his face. Of course she wanted him to meet her husband. She had someone to go home to up here. He was humbled enough being up on this overlook and seeing the first view she’d gotten of the Commonwealth when she walked out of the Vault, but now he’d get to meet her husband and the neighbors that she was always on about. 

It was a sin, he figured, thinking domestic thoughts about another man’s wife. Even if she did listen to him talk about his late wife and Duncan, his pride and joy. Even if her eyes crinkled when she smiled at him and she teared up when she saw small skeletons and he knew the exact feeling. 

They descended the elevator into the ancient structure and the first thing he noticed were the skeletons. 

They were so old, like the ones outside. 

It was cold in the place, and he didn’t hear any voices echoing off the metal walls. The power was out in some sections -- the lights flickered. 

It reminded him of the Vault by his childhood home. Definitely haunted. 

He wanted to crack a joke or say something witty, but instead he stayed silent as she led him through the corridors. Puddles were commonplace and the combined smells of something like an abandoned grocery store, a salt mine, and a broken refrigerator seemed to pour out of the walls. 

She walked steadily ahead and she definitely knew where she was going. He focused on the yellow embroidered 111 on the back of her suit in the dimmed lights, but somehow it just made him feel worse. 

She opened the door slowly, and the last hope that things were maybe normal was destroyed when he saw the pods. It was like something out of a comic book -- one of the pods was open and he could see the scratch damage on the inside. 

Shit. 

“Hi, Nate,” she put on a brave face, walking to the pod directly across from the open one. He didn’t want to get too close, but from what he could see, the guy looked like he was sleeping but… from her grim expression, that was unlikely. 

“This is Robert Joseph MacCready, but I call him RJ because that’s so much less formal,” she smiled a little and took MacCready’s hand, pulling him closer. 

“He’s kept me safe, Nate. I know what you’re thinking,” the dead man obviously didn’t do much thinking, but she continued, “he’s so young, right? He’s so capable though. I hope Shaun grows up to be like him.” 

She laced her fingers together with his and he glanced down between them. 

“Okay, let’s go,” she said after a minute. 

They walked the whole way to the elevator, took it up, and she sat down on the elevator platform when they reached the surface. She laid back and stared at the sky. He stood awkwardly over her, brows furrowed in concern and confusion. 

She patted the ground next to her and he laid down beside her and looked at the stars that were starting to appear despite the clouds. 

“You know how they conducted experiments in the Vaults?” 

MacCready nodded. 

“I was... those pods you saw were cryogenic. I was born before the war, and because Nate was in the military we had a spot in that vault. We'd just signed up for it that morning. They told us that the pods were decontamination pods, but instead they froze us. I don’t know how exactly, but… they froze us for a long time,” her voice was thick with grief, “and when I woke up, I saw someone steal our baby out of Nate’s arms, and then they froze me again. I don't know why I woke up after all this time, but I have to find Shaun. He's all I have left.” 

That explained a lot, actually. Her perfectly straight, too-white teeth, her taller-than-average height, and the tattoos that he'd caught glimpses of that adorned her torso and certainly weren't put there by a shaky-handed raider. 

The desperation she had to find her baby, the one thing of hers that was left after everything was taken away from her. 

MacCready wanted to say that he was sorry, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. His throat was so tight and he missed his wife so much. 

“I’m sorry to drag you into that pit and show you a corpse, but every time I go down there it helps me. Thank you for following me.” 

“That was the deal, wasn’t it?” he said finally in a hoarse whisper and he hoped she heard it.

**Author's Note:**

> I always saw sole survivor's relationship with MacCready as more of an adopted-sibling sort of deal. I think that since Mac didn't have a lot of people to look up to (except the Lone Wanderer), he'd develop crushes on people that he idolized or that treated him with kindness. 
> 
> tl;dr -- she sees him as a younger brother, and he has a huge and ridiculous crush on her.


End file.
